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Yes, I shall probably throw myself into the whirlpool again this year. I've done it for six years now, but I really had trouble last year -- I hadn't been well and dragging out those 50,000 words was hard.

But if it wasn't for NaNoWriMo I certainly wouldn't have written 300,000 words of fiction, that's for sure!_________________tuned in from down under

I didn't do well last year either. Of course in my case I was trying to adjust to a full set of dentures that I'd just gotten the month before so while I wasn't ill my mind wasn't really on NaNo either. I've got a rough idea what I want to write about so hopefully I'll blaze right through my story this year (crosses fingers).
I've got an interesting cover to inspire me anyway. Some of the NaNoer's make covers and one made a cover for me.

Not well at the moment. I'm at only 15,621 words. So I'm well behind where I should be. Part of it is lost momentum I think. I had my optical mouse go out on me which made it impossible to use my netbook and sitting in front of my desktop isn't as comfortable as being able to curl up with the netbook is.

This was the seventh year I’ve taken part, and each year it seems to get a little harder. Last year was especially difficult and I felt a lot of dissatisfaction after cranking out a potboiler titled “The Purple Page.”

This year I was hoping to produce something better. I had spent a lot of time during the year musing on the plot and I felt I had a reasonable plot skeleton worked out.

The title was “The Moonlight Visitors” and would concern a man who discovered that his house guests were actually from a parallel world - that explains the Tasmanian Tiger he saw in the back garden.

Things would have worked out all right if I’d been able to write every day -- about 1700 words a day is recommended. But things distracted me, and I had three or four days when I didn’t write at all. I was short of sleep, averaging about five and a half hours a night. There are some things that you can still do on four hours sleep, but writing fiction is not one of them.

The end result was that I had half the novel written by the time we were two-thirds of the way through the month. My maths isn’t great, but I knew I was in trouble.

I re-organized my schedule for the last ten days of the month to allow me more time to write. Especially the last three or four days. Who was the author who said the secret of writing was applying the backside to the chair and the fingers to the keys?

I managed to finish at 4:15 pm on the last day of the month. Story completed, and almost eight hours to spare. “Whew!” I thought.